Friday, April 09, 2004

OMAROSA OMG WTF!

It'd be incredibly easy and is indeed quite enticing to just call her a pathological liar, but since I'm not qualified to offer an actual diagnosis, I'll put my so-far useless BA in English to work. Remembering her background (and ignoring the conspiracy theorists for the moment who say that Omarosa's latest moronacy/involvement was scripted to some degree), she may have had to traffic in ethical shades of grey (lying and putting on a puppy-dog face to color oneself a victim, and maybe even going so far as to deny one's own responsibility when problems arise in order to maintain one's self-esteem) to get to the virtuous station of political consultant; in other words, what she did with Kwame was how she got to her position in the first place. Whatever the case, she pissed me off something fierce.

It was an episode packed to the gills with twists. Amy of all people getting fired! I took Trump's decision to be inconsistent with his prior reasoning with keeping her, that her track record was too sparkling to ignore. Still, the amount of friction that she's able to inspire in her colleagues has been shown in the past, though not to the extent that, for example, Omarosa's misadventures have been given airtime.

In terms of the competition itself, firing Amy was a jaw-dropping surprise, even though none of the interviewers liked her. She was a total juggernaut with numerous winning ideas. But from the perceptive of the drama, the by now old reality tv standby, that contestants who have been dominating for a protracted number of weeks prior to be upset at or just before the final. In retrospect, it follows the convention, but as if I had that in mind when the cuts were being made. My palms were sweating! Shut up!

As a corollary to that first rule (I should write these down in a list sometime), there's often an unsuspecting dark horse who makes it to the final, and this time it was Kwame. While he really hasn't shown much (or, we haven't been shown much) for leadership (and while his aversion to micro-managing is commendable, he has to make sure that the details are accounted for), his easy charisma ("If he can get two or three more minutes with a client") was rated far more highly than I would have thought it would be.

A tidbit I heard on the radio (sports talk to be exact, so take it with a shaker full of salt) according to someone who knows a woman who's on the production staff of the show: the final teams were pre-selected so that there was some assurance of interpersonal combustion, that Amy and Nick were grouped with each other and likewise with Heidi and Omarosa. I'm not going to comment on how plausible that is, but I wouldn't put it past Mark Burnett to pull such a maneuver.

And the whole concept of getting recently fired people to repopulate the teams (thanks J for bringing this up) is fundamentally flawed. Nick yawning to the camera when he was describing his role was a prime example. These people have lost nearly all their motivation to do a bang up job outside of auditioning for future employers who might be watching the show.